Man, do we have some doves this year, piles of them roosting in roadside trees and feeding in the recently harvested wheat and lentil fields just outside town. So, after I got thoroughly skunked on my first prairie grouse hunt of the year, I sought—and found—sweet consolation in a quick limit of fleet doves.

I could have taken my bounty into the house and cleaned all those birds on the counter. Or I could have used a workbench in the barn. But instead, I turned to only of my oldest friends and most reliable horizontal surfaces in my world: the battered tailgate of my 1994 Toyota pickup.

Parents never really know how they’ve raised their children. There are proxy indicators along the way, of course. Good grades in school, Scout badges, summer jobs, selection to traveling sports teams.

But all those indicators can be weighted with a thumb on the experiential scale. In my small town, for example, my kids might be treated favorably or given second chances because my spouse is so damned nice to everybody. Maybe my kid is a royal jerk in the dugout, but because he routinely strokes fastballs to the gap he makes every all-star team, thereby checking a widely recognized “good kid” box.

I’ve been thinking about parents’ defining job these last weeks as I prepare to send my twin sons off to college. By almost any metric, they’ve achieved all their mother and I could have wanted or expected: high school valedictorian and salutatorian, all-state distance runners, capable hunters, dependable friends, and trustworthy employees. If they’ve never developed the culinary skills I may have wished, they’re good hands with the dishes. They can splice rope, start a fire, tamp a post, and back a trailer.

In all these ways, and in the ways that years turn to generations, my wife and I have accomplished our signal task: we’ve prepared children to go forward without us.

Still, as I dropped one son off at the University of Montana last week, I fretted about all that I haven’t done: prepared my kids for heartbreak, taught them how to monetize an idea, how to console a grieving partner, and how to undercut a hanging log. And I wondered how we’d transition into the next phase of our relationship, each of us with fledgling, uncertain independence.

Deep down, I wonder: how well did I raise my children?

I got a partial answer to that question today as I flew with my other twin to a new start at the University of Michigan. We were seated apart on the last flight, from Minneapolis to Detroit. After touching down, I stood outside the airbridge, waiting for Merlin. He arrived and as we prepared to head to baggage claim, an older woman bee-lined for us. She stuck out her hand to me, and as I shook it she explained that she and her husband had been seated in the back of the plane with Merlin.

“I just want to tell you what a very bright and nice young man you have. He’s going to do very well at anything he tries.”

Merlin was blushing as we walked to baggage claim. I was blinking hard with a mixture of gratitude and selfish sorrow. As much as I’d like to keep these nice young men for myself, it’s time for them to go forward into whatever’s next.

I’m not especially “woke” in the contemporary term, meaning hyper-aware of the inequities of our culture. But I’d like to think that I’m sensitive to the things that divide us, and more interested in working on ways to unite Americans rather than ways that segment and differentiate us.

As a writer, I’m also aware of the power of language to perpetuate divisions and either include or exclude people based on terms. Take the gender-specific term “man.” As in, “anchorman,” or “midshipman,” terms that originated around the reality that only men were involved in the tasks described. That’s happily not the case any longer, but our terms take time to catch up with the times.

Which is why I think it’s time to rethink our use of the term “sportsman” to describe hunters, anglers, and other members of this outdoor-loving tribe to which I happily belong. I have a teenaged daughter who is every bit as capable in the field as any adult man I know, and while she’s never once balked at or mentioned that the term “sportsman” excludes her, as her father, I don’t think it describes her adequately. Several of my buddies in my hometown started a conservation organization a couple years back. We call ourselves “Hi-Line Sportsmen,” but the most active and capable members of the club are women, and I don’t want our name to give the idea to a girl or woman that they’re not welcome to join us.

The origins of the term “sportsman” go back to the early 1700s, as the notion of hunting and fishing for recreation and enjoyment started to displace the idea of both activities as ways to prevent starvation. And the code of conduct that governed the activities gave rise to another term: “sportsmanship.”

I’d hate to abandon that notion that hunting and fishing has a higher calling, but I’m casting about, as it were, for another term to describe all of us as well as what we do. I suppose we could settle on the unsatisfyingly bland term “sportsperson,” but that seems lazy to me. Or maybe we’re “sports,” but that term seems sort of flimsy and frivolous and doesn’t get at the live-taking (and life-giving) gravity of what we do.

I’m gravitating to the term “chaser,” which borrows from an even older tradition, a gender-neutral Middle English word that describes our pursuit of wild animals, and echoes the French term for hunter: “chasseur.” It doesn’t quite describe our pursuit of fish, but it gets closer than another candidate: “stalker.”

Or maybe we look for a term that describes where we exercise our inclination to hunt and fish: outside.

Are we “outies,” like a collective belly button? Or are we “outsters,” which might also describe a fringe political party?

I’d love to hear from you. Can you propose a term that is inclusive, descriptive, and durable enough to last longer than this current political moment?

I have been trying to take a day off to fish all summer, and despite the season and the reason, I haven’t either made or found the time to go nearly as often as I want.

That changed this week. My buddy Joe called to say that conditions looked good tomorrow, and could I join him on our local walleye lake, Fort Peck Reservoir. I could have found good reasons to decline, but on both cellular and psychic levels, I needed a day of fishing, so I accepted.

Joe is a long-time walleye and northern pike predator, and he spends more days on the water, in all seasons, than he would admit to folks outside our circle. But for those inside the circle, he’s the guy you want to fish with. He knows the spots to fish and the gear to use, and he’s pretty good company, besides.

“Without frequent contact, most mentored hunts end up being just guided trips.”

That’s the downbeat assessment of one of my friends and partners in what’s slowly emerging as a national movement to introduce more beginning hunters to the outdoors and the world of self-sufficient foraging.

She’s both right and correct. She’s right in the sense that many of us who extend a hand to a beginner base the experience around an outing – a hunt. We hope to be successful, in order to set the hook. It’s important to be successful – few people want to spend uncomfortable hours or days in the company of a new companion only to return home empty-handed. So we mentors stack the decks in favor of success.

Much of what I know about guns I learned as a Missouri farmkid, shooting big grasshoppers with BB guns, plinking with .22 rifles, and working my way up to quail, squirrels, and eventually deer.

Everything I know about “Kentucky windage,” or holding over a distant target with a duplex reticle, I learned back then and there, behind a 4-power Bushnell Banner scope mounted to my Savage 99 in .243 Win. My early targets were 400 to 500 yards distant.

They were moving.

They were small.

They were muskrats swimming on the surface of our pond in the pasture below our farmhouse. My dad was a mild-mannered farmer who became agitated only at insurance salesmen, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, and balky calves. But any time he saw the V-wake of a muskrat on that pond, he yelled for me to grab my rifle and “go kill that SOB!”

I can’t tell you how many hundreds of 100-grain bullets I fired at those muskrats, my rifle stabilized on top of a wooden fencepost. Neither can I tell you how many of the little rat-tailed varmints I hit, because the ferocious eruption of dirty pondwater water when my bullet hit disguised the outcome of the shot. But I got pretty good at getting close—the very definition of riflescope holdover—thanks to what seemed like a never-ending population of muskrats.

Looking back on it from 40 years, I wonder what happened to all those bullets that ricocheted off the pond’s surface. One of the tenants of firearms safety, of course, is to absolutely not do what I did back then, shoot at water, because of the danger of a bullet unintentionally careening toward people, or barns, or cattle or any number of other non-targets.

I also wonder about my dad’s allowance for this conduct. He was a stickler for almost every other gun-safety commandment. But somehow, they all went out the window when it came to muskrats. Bill Murray, who plays Carl Spackler in the movie “Caddyshack” might have been channeling my dad (and excusing my water-shooting behavior) when he said of gophers, “To kill, you must know your enemy, an in this case my enemy is a varmint. And a varmint will never quit – ever. They’re like the Viet Cong – Varmint Cong. So you have to fall back on superior intelligence and superior firepower. And that’s all she wrote.”

I was just turning a batch of elk jerky in my smoker, flipping each succulent strip in order to dry uniformly, when I noticed movement over my shoulder.

I keep my Camp Chef in the barn, where its beautiful work won’t stink up my house or deck. When I was a kid, our only source of heat was a wood-burning stove, and all my clothes smelled like wood smoke. I didn’t think anything of it when I was younger, but when I was in 8th grade, a girl told me I smelled like bacon. The way she said it made me think she didn’t like bacon. I’ve been sensitive about the topic ever sense. Hence, the smoker in the barn.

It turns out the movement I saw was the swoop of a bird, and as I emerged from the barn, I studied the critter. It was a northern shrike, a blocky grey-and-black bird about the size of a robin, perched on the tongue of an idle disc. We don’t see shrikes very often, so I paid special attention to this specimen, its curved beak and black-streaked head looking coolly around. Like a robin, shrikes are classified as songbirds, but they behave more like raptors. They hunt insects like grasshoppers or even small mammals and birds, often flushing them out of hiding by flapping their wings just above the ground.

But shrikes are sometimes called “butcher birds” for another curious carnivorous habit. They will impale their prey on thorns of trees or the barbs of wire fences, saving them in what biologists call their “pantries” until they’re ready to consume them. Some ornithologists think that female shrikes select mates based on the size and variety of his pantry. Apparently, these girl shrikes don’t care if their mates smell like meat.

I returned to my jerky, puttering in the plumes of rich smoke, preparing snacks that I’d add to my pantry and feed my family all week long. When I emerged from the barn, the shrike was gone.

I’m a recovering redneck. I have purged my vocabulary of the term “warshed,” which I grew up saying to mean “washed,” as in “I haven’t warshed my clothes in a month.” But I still say “crick” for creek and “ruf” to mean roof.

I still carry a pocketknife most every day. I know how to tamp a post and castrate a hog. I can make a fishing rig out of baling twine and a green sapling.

I have a college degree and I like good wine, even if I can’t always pronounce its appellation. I can tie a Windsor knot in a necktie. But I can also trap a muskrat and call a turkey. I know which fork to use for my salad. And I can skin a squirrel and run a chainsaw.

I mention all these “talents” because they’re fundamental to who I am, and I suspect many of you possess the same traits. You won’t want to hear this any more than I want to say it, but they’re disappearing from our culture, as we become a nation of suburbs and fast food and, frankly, dependence. I mention them now because I’m writing this on Independence Day, and all those redneck skills are essential to remaining independent.

I don’t mean that knowing how to clean a carburetor will keep the communists from taking our government. Just as I don’t mean that my ability to gig a frog will liberate any political prisoner. But knowing how to remain comfortable without electricity and how to find food in the woods and how to be okay with self-reliance are all skills and mindsets that will allow you to exercise independence, even if it’s a weekend camping trip with the family.

In many ways, I left my redneck past. I grew up burning wood as our family’s only heat source. I’m glad to have moved away from that. As a kid, my family never bought meat in the store, since we had our own pork, chicken, beef, and deer. I’m happy to indulge every now and again on restaurant wings.

But the other day I heard the Hank Williams, Jr. anthem “Country Boys Can Survive,” and it took me back to cane poles and rabbit hunting and maybe just a little bit of cheap beer and Beechnut.

Hank Junior made his song a political anthem: “You can’t stomp us out and you can’t make us run. ‘Cause we’re them old boys raised on shotguns…” I celebrate my heritage not in opposition to anyone, but as a proud, capable, fundamentally independent redneck. And what’s more American than that?

Grab a lawn chair and pop a top America – we’re about to shed some light on one of the coolest pieces of American history (and likely something your high school history teacher forgot to tell you):

It’s the early 19th century. An apple-pie eating, beer drinking, American man by the name of Mr. Waddell heads into the New Jersey surf with aspirations of harvesting some oysters. Meanwhile, Mr. Martin (a real prick of a fella with ties to European nobility) finds out about Waddell and throws a fit. This European yahoo takes our patriotic brother to court on grounds that the oysters harvested, in water that adjoined Martin’s property line, were Martin’s property. Thus, Waddell is accused of being a no good, dirty rotten, thief.

My longtime friend Bud came through town the other day, on his way home with an 8-week-old pointer riding shotgun. We greeted the pup like a new member of our extended family, which in many ways he is, and will become.

As I visited with Bud, talk turned to all the other dogs that have shared our lives, and I was a little surprised to recall all the firsts that occurred in Bud’s company: my first tundra swan; my first successive limits of Hungarian partridges; my first hunting dog, a rescue Lab cross who hid under my bed the first time she saw a gun but developed into a talented retriever of anything with wings and a cackle, thanks in part to Bud’s encouragement.